What’s new – and not so new – as the IndyCar season hits its stride

Take a look throughout the top 10 in the NTT IndyCar Series drivers’ championship leading into this weekend’s Children’s of Alabama Grand Prix at Barber Motorsports Park and there’s only one name that sits in a familiar place.

Three-time champion Alex Palou has been on a hot streak since the first race and holds a sizable 34-point lead over the field, but that’s where normalcy meets its end. Palou’s closest pursuers bear different names from those who chased the Spaniard through the final races to close 2024, and it’s in the shuffled order behind the Chip Ganassi Racing driver where the early-season intrigue is revealed.

Last year, it was Andretti Global’s Colton Herta who nearly caught Palou in the final races, and while Herta remains in the mix today, it’s from back in seventh, 69 points behind the championship leader. In place of Herta, Andretti’s top performer over the last two months has been Kyle Kirkwood, winner of the most recent race in Long Beach, and in third, it’s an Arrow McLaren driver, but not the one most would expect.

Pato O’Ward, the face of the series and Arrow McLaren, sits in sixth, 62 points adrift from Palou, while new teammate Christian Lundgaard — on the back of two straight podiums — is leading the squad while enjoying his most competitive championship start to date in third, 46 points down to the Ganassi.

In fourth, it’s Meyer Shank Racing’s Felix Rosenqvist, 54 points shy of Palou, who has the team in its strongest place since MSR debuted in 2017. Rosenqvist also ranks as second-best among the wider Ganassi hemisphere, thanks to the technical alliance struck between the teams during the offseason. And in fifth, Ganassi’s Scott Dixon is 56 points behind Palou.

After O’Ward in sixth and Herta in seventh, the oddities of the 2025 season to date really stand out as the remainder of the top 10 is filled by the entirety of Team Penske. Pre-season championship favorite Scott McLaughlin is eighth with a 73-point chasm to bridge. Teammate Will Power is ninth, with 79 points to find, and Josef Newgarden completes the top 10 with an imposing 84-point deficit to first place.

Kirkwood, not Herta. Lundgaard, not O’Ward. Rosenqvist, not Dixon. Penskes no higher than eighth. The top three also represent IndyCar’s next-generation drivers with an average age of 25.6.

And behind Palou, it’s an entirely different top five from those who finished second through fifth in the 2024 championship. With the maximum points tally of 54 available at any race (50 to win, one for pole, one for leading a lap, and two for leading the most laps), Palou enters the fourth race of the year with a full race’s worth of points over every driver from fourth place and beyond.

Barber’s been a happy hun ting ground for McLaughlin the last two years, and he’s looking for another trophy to recharge his title hopes. Michael Levitt/Lumen

For those who’ve already become bored with the Palou Show dominating headlines, all it takes is for adversity to pay its first visit to his No. 10 Honda at some point during Barber’s 90-lap race and that 34-point lead could be gone in an instant. Palou’s streaky start has been aided by good fortune, but bad luck should find him at least once or twice this year. It’s just a question of when.

If it’s soon, his pursuers will have a chance to reel in the No. 10 car before Palou can pad his lead, but if he can keep the momentum rolling, it could be a repeat of 2024 where late misfortune had a smaller impact on his run to the title.

The former is what drivers like Penske’s McLaughlin, who owns the last two Barber victories, is hoping for as he arrives in Alabama on a mission to dig out of that 73-point hole.

“Feels possible, for sure,” McLaughlin said of catching Palou. “Alex has been lights out, and that’s a credit to him and his team and who he is as a driver. Where he’s able to extract the speed and whatnot, it’s impressive, and then put it together, as we all know. But what he does doesn’t control is how we execute. That’s the biggest thing for us.

“We’re just completely focused on executing, getting some momentum back, and making it happen. I feel like we’re going to some tracks that we enjoy now and moving forward, we go to Detroit after Indy, even, and I feel good there. There’s so many things that can happen in this next little period. It’s unfortunate that we’ve had a bad race, but if we don’t have a bad race from here on in, we could just keep just knocking on the door and being close to the top three every race, or top five with a couple of wins along the way. We’re right there.

“Because I feel like you’ve got to have a semi-bad race at some point. If you don’t, you deserve to be champion. But you can’t. Can’t just be worried about what they’re doing, just going to focus on what we can control and make it happen. I feel super confident. I feel good. I feel right there.”

Beyond presenting the opportunity for drivers like McLaughlin to improve their positions in the standings, Barber also offers the best chance so far in 2025 for a normal race to play out for teams, drivers and fans.

St. Petersburg produced the one and only caution of the season, which happened on the first lap. Since then, it’s been non-stop green running and three races of endless debates about tire compounds, tire degradation and tire strategies.

At Barber, there’s a hope for a return to hardcore racing and a few cautions to create passing opportunities on restarts, without tires being the main topic of discussion for the fourth consecutive event. Friday’s opening practice session, which has undergone some minor tweaks to the format, will provide guidance on whether Firestone’s new and harder primary tire will be a modest change from last year, or if it will create the same significant spread in lifespan and pace that ruled St. Pete, Thermal, and Long Beach.

Kirkwood would be happy to have a weekend off from tire talk and put the focus back on the racing. Richard Dole/Lumen

“The Firestone Firehawk primary tire and alternate (red sidewall) tires for this year’s Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix have the same construction as those provided for the 2024 race at Barber Motorsports Park,” said Cory Williams, Firestone’s principal program engineer in IndyCar. “However, we’ve developed a new compound for the primary tire to provide increased durability and a decrease in grip as compared to last year.”

Count Kirkwood among those who just want to see great wheel-to-wheel racing on Sunday without tire strategy ruling the event’s outcome.

“I think we’re gonna be back to more of a normal style of racing,” Kirkwood said. “So far, it’s been a clear choice on which tire you want to pick for the race, which has created the racing that we’ve had at street courses. And then Thermal was an anomaly, because we’d never been there before for a proper race. So yeah, I’m looking forward to getting back to Barber and I think it’s going to be more of the same that we’ve seen there in the past.

“You’ll see some split strategies, but mostly tire-wise, it’s not a ton different. You can kind of get away with either tire, depending on how long you’re going to go in a stint. The only difference is will it be a typical Barber two- or three-stop race, which three-stop has won in the past couple years. It’s still a little bit interesting from that aspect. But I think tire-wise, it’s not going to be as much of a talking point as it has been everywhere else.”

What a strange beginning to a season. Once Barber is done, the first quarter of the 2025 season will be complete and Indianapolis will set the series off into its second quarter. Who’ll be charging into the Speedway from a position of strength, and who’ll be fighting to get their championship bids back on track?